[dominiquer60]

Thanks All, I am enjoying getting to know them better. I am happy to have a well mated pair. If I had two identical pairs of calves to choose from one red, one roan I am not sure I could decide, so I am glad to have one of each 🙂

[dominiquer60]

I started my first team of cattle at 6 months because it was what I had available to me at the time for no cost, and I wanted to see if it would really be something that I could do well enough and enjoy. So I did well enough and really enjoyed the process, the first team is not really mine and they will probably be sold in the spring. I picked up a pair of Durham bull calves yesterday with the hope of them becoming my farm team for years to come.

I enjoy raising them from calves, developing a relationship with them and taking them through the steps of training. If I needed Ox power I might just buy a started pair of older steers, but seeing as we have 16 tractors and 3 men that love using and working on them, there is no urgent need for Ox power on our farm. So I can take my time and give the young cattle odd and size appropriate jobs as they surface.

The nice thing about cattle over horses is that they can be worked younger, an 8 month old pair of calves can haul their own manure every day, a 14 month old pair can be used to get firewood. An 8month old horse is halter broke and desensitized to a few things, a 14 month old horse may be broke to carry a harness and perhaps ground driven at the most. By the time cattle are ready for heavy work they have already had a ton of work experience and have had a lot of kinks worked out already. I would imagine that buying an older team, like buying a team of horses, would take some time for all to get used to each other and create a new human/animal working relationship.

I enjoy may cattle, they are not better or worse, just different than horses and what works for me. Good luck if you do get a team of cattle, they can be very pleasurable animals to work with.

Erika

[dominiquer60]

I will not be able to bring both the harrow and bull calves to the event, so the harrow will have to stay home, it requires less TLC for the family to take care of while I am away 🙂

Erika

[dominiquer60]

My limited experience is that if you can nip them in the bud right away and don’t let them (deer. turkey, etc) make any habit of browsing your crop, than you have a better chance at making your efforts worth while, no deer again last night.

Erika

[dominiquer60]

I have never owned a horse but I have worked with and enjoyed them for 25 years, including training young drafts to drive at college. If you have told me 25 months ago that I would own a pair of cattle before I even seriously considered a team of horses I would have told you that you were crazy. Yet here I stand now with the Ox bug and 2 teams of young cattle at my home.

I don’t think that I lost the horse bug, but cattle just fit into my life and the farm that I live on better than horses would at the moment. Training is similar in some ways, but I find cattle better suited to my personality than horses, they seem to me less over reactive to their environment too.

Thats just my 2 cents,

Erika

[dominiquer60]

The guys here think that you would not be able to break the ears up with the silo filler, you would be better off with the hammer mill, you need to feed it in slowly to break the cobs up they say.

Erika

[dominiquer60]

I had the same problem with our barnyard chickens eating broadcasted oats in the house garden. The dog was a temp fix, then I added 150′ of poultry net to keep them out, doubting that they would make their way to the end of the net. Then the next night deer came and ate some of the two beds of storage beets in the same garden, again dog was a temp fix at dusk chasing them away, then I surrounded the entire garden with double poultry net and a couple strands of 6′ high white electric tape and a couple of terror eyes that keep birds out of corn. It has worked the last two nights, plan C will be to tie the dog out all night. Fire arms would be difficult because of the close proximity of the two houses. Good Luck with your turkeys, if you have poultry net it mat keep them out if you set it up to block their access some, it may stop them or slow them down.

Erika

[dominiquer60]

If you are not in a hurry and no one here has a lead for you, keep your eye on the farm auction pages (Lancaster Farming has a lot) and ebay, you can even save searches there and have them contact you when something you are interested in is posted. I found my single horse plow, and 6 row Planet Jr. at auctions, and my push Planet Jr. on ebay, they are viable possibilities if nothing else. Good Luck

Erika

[dominiquer60]

This vegan talk reminds me of a girlfriend who had a brief relationship with a Vegan man. The big problem she had with his logic was that a soy protein based diet is not sustainable. How can we grow enough food with veganic agriculture if we eliminate petroleum power, animal power and animal based fertilizer of both the manure and juiced up animal kinds? I can agree with vegetarians all day long, but Vegan does not make sustainable sense to me.
I will continues to raise, eat and work animals because this makes me happy and more importantly it compliments the nutrient cycles that I rely on to farm.

Erika

ps Mitch, I understand where you are coming from, I don’t plan on taking my animals public too often, but when I had to be at the fair for 9 days anyway it was nice to have my team there, and many more people enjoyed them than not. I have been dealing with the animal rights crazies at this fair for 25 years and they have never stopped me from having a good time, mostly they just make good dinner conversation:)

[dominiquer60]

I understand too, I was in a similar situation in August at our county fair. I was returning to the Draft Pavilion from the Cattle Show Ring with my yearling team. There was quite the crowd and I was doing my best to avoid any hairy situations. We had to pass by a very active Pony Show Ring with many spectators. The pony people are very easy to rile up and one had a nasty spill earlier requiring an ambulance. A golf cart caused us to pause for a moment and my steer Dick decides to call out. I gently tap his muzzle to redirect his attention to me and walk on. A voice from behind, “I can’t believe that lady just hit that cow because it was crying.” Not knowing who said that, I just replied over my shoulder, “There has been one ambulance call already today for this pony show, and I don’t need my animal to cause another kid to fall off and get hurt, surely that would be worse than any tap on the nose,” and then we finished walking back to our stabling. I find often people that are quick to point out something that they think is “wrong” often have no solid basis for such opinions, and probably have some mentally tormented pet at home that they think is spoiled.

Erika

[dominiquer60]

If I recall correctly their was a Small Farmers Journal article about a farm in Europe, and I believe that they used horses to spread liquid manure from some sort of tank on a wheeled vehicle. I don’t have my stack of back issues to look at, but perhaps someone that has access to that issue would share with us if what I remember is correct.

Rain has put at ease our desperation for creative tillage ideas, we received .7 inches in the last 24, which is the biggest rain since mid July for us, and it looks like more tomorrow. I am off to spin some oats and rye, the cattle will help me incorporate the seed before our nice crumbly clay turns to pudding with this Tropical Storm. I am looking forward to a rainy morning breakfast and an easy day planting lettuce in the greenhouse:)

Erika

PS to Tim, so many of them are clogged that our long term goal (with older generation’s permission) is to replace them at a deeper depth, we have some old maps, but they always seem off when they try to work on them, I am not sure about finding them with a probe.

[dominiquer60]

Generally you want to cover manure soon after spreading or else the volatile nitrogen component will escape back into the atmosphere and you loose nutrients that you could have used to feed plants.

[dominiquer60]

Thanks guys for the reply. It has been a challenging year in our droughty clay soil, it bakes like a brick. I did seed these oats and peas down before a forecasted rain, but like all the rain in the last 9 weeks, it never amounted to anything. A couple weeks ago we got 4/10 of an inch and it only moistened the top three inches of soil, just dust underneath. Of course the long range for the next two months is below average rainfall. Our trees are already turning and many are barren of leaves too.

Last night we tried watering this 1/3 acre oats and pea seeding on Field B, we used 2400 gallons of water which is two firetrucks worth of water, I wish I had a video for you all. It may not amount to much I fear.

You are right about the bare fallow Tim, without the rain it doesn’t work well, fortunately we had just enough to have a few flushes of weeds in field A.

Right now we are struggling wondering what to do with the 8+ acres of winter rye that we want to seed. We have many different scenarios to deal with. First field was silage corn on a normally dry hilltop, it has been chiseled and disced, it is nice and fluffy waiting for seed and rain. Second field was sweet corn that never had enough water to make a saleable crop and some fallow ground, still working on chopping corn to feed the beef. Third field was rye on normally wetter ground, a good amount of grass and clover volunteered after harvest and my two have been rotated over it the last 3 weeks, they have a couple days left before we would like to work it up a bit. Fourth area is on the flat near my original field B, different strips of vegetables that burnt out with the drought and heat, usually a high water table. I plowed it up a couple weeks back and have been waiting for enough rain to make discing somewhat effective, it is just hard clumps at the moment.

I would like to chisel where my cattle are, but the guys don’t want to hit the two old tile lines in that field. I know you can adjust a chisel plow to go shallow, but they are rather gun shy about trying it. We will see what happens with weather, moods and all.

Erika

[dominiquer60]

I seeded some oats and peas on September first as a cover crop in 2 different fields. Field A was bare fallowed with discs and /or a perfecta harrow for the month of July and August to knock off some hot weather seeds in the bank. It is also on good slope next to the road and has a wet spot in the middle of it during a normal year. We have not had over a half inch of rain at one time in the last 9 weeks, total we have not had more than 2.5 inches in that time.
Field B was our first seeding of sweet corn on the flat, after harvest it was slowly chopped for the beef cows a little at a time and then plowed under and disced once. It was moist when plowed, but was a little dry when I disced it just before seeding. Both fields were broadcast seeded, incorporated with a light harrowing and cultipacked with a double gang brillon.

So far we have received a tenth of an inch here and a three tenths there with above average temps. Field A actually has some oat and peas growing, thinner than I wanted but fairly uniform except for a shallow corner by the only bordering tree. Field B on the flat (with water table usually just inches below) has a couple little strips of oats and some random peas here and there.

Here is what I would like to have done different if I had it to do again. I would have liked to have chisel plowed Field B, with the corn chopped off there was not a lot of debris to deal with but the plot was very weedy. I would have liked to have disced it at least once more and given it a little more fallow time before seeding into a hopefully smoother finer bed than the one that I had, I don’t think I had good soil/seed contact. Perhaps this is not the best thing to do but I wish is was a possibility, but we actually cannot use a chisel on the flat because we are afraid of ripping up the 100 year old shallow clay tiles that drain our only flat ground. Any ideas of what I did wrong or rather do you have a different approach that I could try in the future to conserve moisture in a less than ideal cover crop seeding season?

Thanks in advance,

Erika

PS We are talking tractor farming here, cattle are slowly getting worked into the mix as they grow, change is slow sometimes.

[dominiquer60]

I have the same problem, my yearling working beef cattle get even less grain and are on some rough droughty pasture. At my county fair the ox teamsters thought my cattle were too fat and the beef people thought that they were too skinny so I figure they are right where they should be:)

Erika

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